


Profs!AU: Special Features

by Ardatli



Series: Profs!AU [7]
Category: Young Avengers
Genre: Deleted Scenes, M/M, Profs!AU, Vignettes, bits and pieces, collected junk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 16:28:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardatli/pseuds/Ardatli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bits and pieces from There's No Textbook For This: deleted scenes, vignettes not really long enough to post on their own, etc. Ratings will change for each one, though we're starting off Gen. Keep an eye on the notes for each chapter.</p><p>1. Park Scene (Deleted Scene, chapter three. Teddy, Gen.)<br/>2. Kate's Good at Things (Rewritten Scene, chapter four. Kate & Teddy, Gen.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed. Actually, technically not, since my beta for this chapter recommended I cut this piece for pacing purposes. She was absolutely right in terms of the chapter, but I like the glimpse it gives into Teddy's mindset. 
> 
> A Park Scene: Teddy at the opening of Profs!AU Chapter Three, October. 
> 
> Gen, reference to Teddy & Eli friendship.

**Chapter Three: October**

The forms took about a million years to figure out (what the hell was a P-card, and was he even supposed to have one?), and Teddy didn’t end up going out that weekend. Not out-out, anyway.

The leaves were turning outside his window, the smell of the air a welcome distraction. He ended up bussing it down to the park just to feel the breeze in his hair and the nip of the incoming autumn on his cheeks. Dried leaves crunched under his feet and the smell of musky loam rose up around him as he veered off the path a few times. It took him a little bit of searching but he eventually found a quiet place just to sit and think, and let the world move on around him in his stillness.

A couple passed by along the path, arms around each other’s waists. The guy had dark hair that flopped a little over his brow and Teddy couldn’t help it, couldn’t see anything but Bill.

_It would be like this, a crisp fall day. They would walk  together, arms barely brushing, meandering along a dozen little side paths. The smell of cooking grease would pull them in and they’d argue about food trucks, and then Teddy would buy them fries to share. Bill would put too much ketchup on them and they’d fight for the last ones, laughing and duelling with the little wooden sporks. He’d let Bill win, but he’d end up with ketchup on his cheek, a little smear beside his mouth. Teddy would try and wipe it away with the pad of his thumb but it would only smear more, and then he’d lean in and-_

_And his pocket would buzz._

No, not his pocket. His phone. The dream splintered into a thousand shards and melted away. Teddy wasn’t about to kiss Bill in the middle of Central Park; he was perched on a boulder alone, staring off into space, looking like the kind of creeper parents warned their kids about.

His pocket buzzed again.

What if- 

He didn’t want to look down.

Schrodinger’s text. The longer he didn’t look, the longer he could keep alive the flicker of wishful thinking that it would read something like ‘Broke up with Nate; wanna go out?’

It was a nice thought. Impractical, impossible, but nice.

He was thirty-one. He was too old for stupid teenage fantasies.

Teddy dug his phone out and looked at the screen, ready for the thick grey blanket of disappointment to wrap the afternoon in fog.

**Eli: Tell me you’re coming to Grad/Fac on Friday.**

**Eli: Kate’s driving me nuts. Need allies.**

That wasn’t what he had wanted, but it was - yeah. That was almost as good.

**_Ted: You know I have your back._ **

**Eli: Awesome. Now get your sorry butt online so I can kick it. CoD?**

**_Ted: I’ll be home in about an hour. Good?_ **

Teddy hit ‘send’ and a knot inside himself untangled. So maybe he was in a rut, and while not having a boyfriend sucked, it wasn’t as though he was any good at it when he did have one. And in the meantime, he had friends and work and the endless potential of the city sprawling out around him. It really wasn’t so bad. 


	2. Rewritten Scene: November

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I originally had the party scene in October play out quite differently - Teddy held off on confronting Nate until later, and Kate's pep talk took quite a different turn. I still really like this scene and the chemistry between Teddy and Kate, even though it's absolutely not canon for Profs!AU any more. 
> 
> There's also a hefty chunk of material in here that was part of a subplot for Kate that eventually got pulled. I may end up using that story arc later on, but it didn't quite fit with TnTFT's focus on Billy and Teddy and ended up having to come out so that it didn't drag everything else down. 
> 
> Come! Watch my process in action. XD 
> 
> Unbetaed.

_Heavily revised, following the party scene rewrite:_

 --

His office door was unlocked. Teddy had definitely locked it when he’d left to go teach his eight o clock, which meant that someone had unlocked it again in the last five hours. It was Monday, so it couldn’t be Janice. Building security, maybe, or a break-in? His laptop was about the only thing of actual value in there, if you didn’t count the books, but he had partially-written exams in his filing cabinet, and if those had been stolen-

He pushed the door open. Kate was sitting at his desk, more bedraggled than he had ever seen her, hair wrapped up around a pen and her shoes sitting on the floor beside the hot-air vent. She was head-down and writing, and looked up when he came in.

“Good afternoon?” Teddy blinked, set his bag down on the floor and let the door close behind him. He frowned with concern. “Is... everything alright?”

She looked up and acknowledged him with a small, tired smile. “My office is flooded. I would have gone to hang out in the lounge, but I’m working on exam answer keys. You don’t mind?”

“No, no – of course not,” he answered, purely out of reflex. “Flooded? I didn’t see anything in the hall.”

“Something important blew in the pipes, apparently,” Kate sagged back in his chair. “They think it has something to do with the construction next door. I walked in to about an inch of water on the floor, and more pouring from the ceiling. I saved the important things, and HVAC and custodial were in earlier to clean up the rest. I’m supposed to stay out for the rest of the day to let everything finish drying out.”

That answered that, now the next question. Teddy only had the one chair; he dropped down to sit on the floor, his arms resting casually on his bent knees and his back against the wall. “How’d you get in? I know I locked up. Don’t tell me that I can add ‘lock picking’ to my list of ‘reasons why Kate Bishop is awesome.’”

Kate set her pen down and curled her legs up underneath her. “You can, but that’s not how I got in. There are only ten master locks for this building. Our key also works in about six of the classrooms, Dr. Rogers’ office, and the third floor custodial closet. And probably more that I haven’t tried yet.” She paused, then narrowed her eyes, and a hint of a smile flickered across her lips. “You don’t really have a list.”

“I might,” Teddy grinned back, relaxing a little now that they were back into a teasing zone. “I heard that Kate Bishop is the reason why Waldo is in hiding,” he intoned, a little proud of the way he managed to keep a relative deadpan for the delivery.

“I think I’ve heard that before.” The corner of Kate’s mouth quirked up. “Except it was a Chuck Norris joke.” 

Teddy nodded solemnly. “It was. Kate Bishop is _so_ awesome that Chuck Norris turned over his list to her for safekeeping.” 

And that made her actually smile, not the ghost of a grimace that she’d had on before, and it made her laugh, and that buoyed him up again as well.

Kate cushioned her chin in her palm, and she looked so young for a minute, so utterly different than the usual Strong, Cool, Confident that he normally associated with her. “You’re good at that, you know,” she said, apropos of, apparently, nothing.

He didn’t follow, and he frowned. “At what?”

“At making people feel better. About the world. About themselves.” And he supposed that was true, in some ways. At least, it was what he _tried_ to do. Hallowe’en had been ample proof that he really kind of sucked at it sometimes.

That had been something his mom had taught him. _‘People won’t always remember the things you do, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel._ ’ It had been right before that first prep school interview, the one for St. George’s; she’d tied his tie and tried to calm his anxiety, and he could still hear her clearly in his mind. _‘Being kind and making the people around you feel appreciated are more important things than knowing every answer. You can always look something up later, but it’s a lot harder to fix a bad opinion.’_  

She’d meant it as advice for school and job interviews, but it worked okay as a general philosophy. Most of the time.

“I don’t like my friends getting picked on,” he said, matching her more serious tone. “Even when it’s self-inflicted.”

“And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“I know you’re not as zen as you pretend to be, for starters,” Kate offered up.

“I try to take things as they come,” Teddy tried, waited to see if she’d accept that answer. She arched an eyebrow at him and he shrugged, a little uncomfortable under the sudden scrutiny. “You can call it zen if you want to. I try not to get too attached to plans. Go with the flow. Whatever. It’s easier that way.” Oh, he was _such_ a liar.

Well, maybe not. He _tried_ not to get attached. He couldn’t help it if some stuff slipped under the wire.

“Or people?”

He fought the urge to squirm. When had this conversation turned into an interrogation? He couldn’t quite pinpoint the moment when the tone had changed. “Come again?”

Kate’s dark hair was starting to unravel itself from around the pen that was holding it up, and she was starting to look like a vaguely disreputable librarian. “The doctrine of nonattachment to worldly things – does that extend to people?”

“I... guess?” Teddy was caught off-guard, and answered perhaps more honestly than he wanted to. “In some ways? People leave. They make promises they mean but can’t keep, or end up on the other side of the world, or they die-  there’s not much point in holding on too tightly.” A hollow feeling expanded in his chest when he found himself saying that, and he did his best to ignore it. 

She was looking at him with a cross between compassion and a careful measuring stare that belonged on the business end of a microscope. “That sounds lonely.”

He shrugged. “I do okay.” And he did, if you counted ‘staying out of drama’ points. He was nursing a crush, sure, but he wasn’t _pining_. (Okay, maybe he was pining, but he wasn’t sitting outside Bill’s window with an iPod and a set of speakers. He should absolutely get points for that.) And he wasn’t anyone’s secret father, or stalking or being stalked, or actively involved in a love triangle-

-         what he _was_ , was smart enough not to make that last comparison out loud.

Kate softened, but only a little. “You deserve better than okay, you know.”

Teddy shook his head, now entirely lost. There were about six conversations happening at once here, and he was only peripherally aware of maybe two of them. And even then, he wasn’t sure what on earth his response was supposed to be for either. “Kate... what’s this about?”

“If you don’t know, I’m certainly not going to tell you.” She uncurled from his chair and unpinned her hair, dropped the pen back on his desk with a clatter. “Just... think about it. About making plans. Putting down roots. There are people here who could use a little attaching-to.”

“Including you?” he raised an eyebrow at her from his seat on the floor, then grabbed for the hand she stretched out to him and used the leverage to get himself to his feet.

Kate paused for a second, then favoured him with a sardonic half-smile that he was beginning to realize meant something along the lines of ‘duh, you big doof.’ Her final words on the matter confirmed it. “Maybe. I’m getting used to you.” 


End file.
